Year: 2021

OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS by Barbara Comyns

This is a strangely inspirational book about failed painting careers, poverty and abortion. It tells the story of a young female art student who marries another art student. She gets pregnant and they are both horrified. Bizarrely, because it is the 1930s, or because he does not understand biology, the husband blames her. He refuses to take any responsibility for the baby, insisting he must focus on his art. The wife understands, because she too wants to be an artist. But instead she gets to do menial jobs for money. Eventually they split up and she ends up on the street with her baby. She manages to pull herself out of the situation by leaving London and getting a job as a cook.

Reading this summary you might think this is a depressing book. What is strange is that it is written in a light, comic tone, and can only be described as uplifting. For example, right near the beginning, speaking of her husband’s aunt, we suddenly get onto:

She even like my newts, and sometimes when we went to dinner there I took Great Warty in my pocket; he didn’t mind being carried about, and while I had dinner I gave him a swim in the water jug. 

Her what? Her newts? Or try this:

The book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine.  I think this is partly because there isn’t any conversation. I could fill pages like this:

“I am sure it is true,” said Phyllida.

“I cannot agree with you,” answered Norman.

“Oh, but I know I am right,” she replied.

. . That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people’s books.  I know this will never be a real book that business men in trains will read. . . . I wish I knew more about words.  Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school.  I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since.  All the same, I am going on writing this book even if business men scorn it.  

I looked up the author afterwards and found the book was indeed quite autobiographical. What filled me with huge joy was to find that her husband does not even have a Wikipedia page. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. All that selfishness (sacrifice?) and apparently for nothing.

I am also really inspired by Comyns biography. It said she “worked in an advertising agency, a typewriter bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures.” It makes other author bios, involving lists of novels/essays/teaching posts seem maybe more ‘successful’ but somehow rather narrow and sad.

SH*T MY DAY SAYS by Justin Halpern

In this book I supported someone in monetizing his Twitter feed. I didn’t object. I’m always in favour of people other than Twitter making money off Twitter.

The author of this book got unexpectedly dumped, and so did what you get to do if you are not an immigrant: move back in with his parents. He was inspired to start a small Twitter account for his friends where he posted various things his dad said, and it went viral. Publishing deals followed. Meanwhile, in London, the Amazon algorithm noticed I had been buying lightly comic books, and here we are.

The book was funny, and I often laughed reading it. Most appealing, however, was the obvious love between father and son. The dad’s advice is blunt but caring.

“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”

And:

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”

It’s a perfect mix of chuckles and heart. Well done Amazon algorithm, well done.

MARIANA BY Monica Dickens

First of all let’s try to come to terms with the fact that Dickens was only twenty-four when she wrote this novel. And it wasn’t even her first, but her second, the first having been a BESTSELLER.

I can’t comfort you with the reflection that it is not good, because it is really rather good. It’s a coming-of-age story that mostly mirrors Dickens’ own. The section on her childhood is particularly impressive. I love this:

Mary climbed into the neat little cattle-pen and pretended she was a horse, which meant standing quite still and feeling like a horse inside, without any outward pantomime

Her early adulthood is interesting too, especially her unsuccessful stint at drama school. I suspect many can relate to her bleak summary of what happened to those who did not give up on that particular dream early enough:

(They) battered out their youth against the doors of agents, did crowd work for films or sacrificed their so-called innocence for a walking-on part or chance in Cabaret.

There is a particularly wrenching scene where she realizes the boy she has had a crush on for years is not seriously interesting in her, but has just been enjoying her devotion. The quality of the book takes an abrupt nosedive when, in her early twenties, she meets the man she will marry, Sam. Dickens has these two characters ludicrously simpatico. Allegedly even when apart they wake at the same time, eat the same food at the same time, speak the same words and even hear the same songs (?). Clearly this is drivel. Also imagine anyone you know getting a new boyfriend and having this view about a night out with friends:

Mary was longing to get away with Sam and discuss them all. That was the only point now for her, of going to any party.

I can only assume that the first part of the book was based on her actual experience, and this last part is what she hoped real love would be like. I googled it and indeed she did not get married till her late thirties. I can only imagine her views evolved. On my side I observe people in love can often hardly agree on the same way to load the dishwasher, never mind have the same sleeping/eating/ghostly song (?) hearing schedule.

THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY by Laura Jean McKay

This book has an amazing sounding premise:

. . . a strange pandemic begins sweeping the country, its chief symptom that its victims begin to understand the language of animals. Many infected people lose their minds . . .

No one doesn’t wonder what their cat thinks of them, and I loved the idea of finding out. Unfortunately I sort of struggled with this book. What the animals have is say is stuff like this:

My front end

takes the food

quality.

Muzzle

for the Queen

(Yesterday).

I’m not sure I’m much the wiser. More than that though, I found the protagonist almost unbearably annoying. She lets her obviously infected son into their compound, and doesn’t feel any guilt about it. She loves her granddaughter, but in a creepily sentimental way. She contracts everyone’s names (‘Ange’ for Angela, etc). She is often described as ‘gulping’ her drinks. These are things I don’t like. It’s not super defensible, but okay. I maybe could have handled it, but then she rear-ends a truck full of factory farmed pigs. I couldn’t face hearing what they think of us, so I quit.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS by Alison Lurie

Here is a Pulitzer winner, pitched as a novel about the love lives of plain women. I was ready to love it. It even had a very excellent opening sentence.

On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.

But things go down hill from there. It tells the story of two American professors on sabbatical in London. One is a handsome man, the other a plain woman. The man has some romantic problems, but basically everything works out great.

The woman finally meets someone to fall in love with but is so hung up on past rejections that she doesn’t even notice. I don’t know. I just found it super bleak. I guess I don’t really believe there is any such thing as ‘plainness,’ outside of edge cases (e.g., extreme obesity). Some people are pretty, that’s for sure, but even the not-that-pretty can make themselves appear at least reasonably decent enough for some other reasonably decent person to want them. The competition’s just not that steep. Even if you don’t look that good, it’s not as if most of the others do either. I guess I just found the whole idea of some unchangeable quality of ugliness kind of distasteful and ridiculous.

WOW, NO THANK YOU by Samantha Irby

For some reason I had the idea I wouldn’t like this lady’s work, and had put off reading anything by her for months. Big mistake. Turns out I LOVE HER.

WOW, NO THANK YOU is a series of comic essays about her daily life, covering such topics as ageing, irritable bowel, social awkwardness, and her love for her phone. One essay begins:

I once starred in a horror movie called I Was Caught Waiting, Alone, in a Public Place, without my Fucking Cellular Phone

She is enthused by it’s “cracked screen and lightly buttered handfeel.” Lightly buttered exactly describes my phone too.

She is hyper conscious of others’ feelings about her. Here’s an example, where she is being wheeled down the hospital corrider by a nurse on the way to a serious surgery:

And because my brain is a nightmare, I kept thinking, “Is this bed too heavy for her to push? Is this the heaviest bed she’s ever pushed? Is she going to need help to take that sharp right corner? Maybe I should just get up and push her in the bed instead,” and thank goodness I signed that DNR because what is the point of living like this? Anyway, we made it to surgery

What I found most interesting about this book though is the author’s casual attitude to achievement. She had a rough start in life, and struggles with depression, and generally she aspires just to get through the day. I found this kind of an inspirational approach. I wonder if when one has an easier start in life, one sets a higher bar on achievement to be ‘happy,’ and maybe that’s a trap.

AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM by Nicolas Mathieu

Here is a story about being poor on the outskirts of Luxembourg. Though let’s not get carried away: no one in Western Europe is poor by global standards. Perhaps it’s better to say, here is a story about perceived inequality on the outskirts of Luxembourg, but that’s not quite as snappy.

Anthony had just turned fourteen. He could devour an entire baguette with Vache qui Rit cheese as a snack. At night, wearing headphones, he sometimes wrote songs. His parents were idiots.

This is the first paragraph, and I’m already loving it. Here is a description of Anthony’s community:

The men said little and died young. The women dyed their hair and looked at life with gradually fading optimism.

The story covers four summers in the late nineties as Anthony, his friends, and his frenemies, grow into adulthood. It provides a microsm of a small French town that is struggling with de-industrialisation. Like kids everywhere, they are convinced against all evidence that they will lead big lives, unlike those fools their parents:

She couldn’t grasp how much determination and humble sacrifice was required to keep an average existence afloat, to bring home a salary, plan holidays, maintain the house, cook dinner every evening, and be present and attentive, while still giving a novice teenager the chance to gradually earn her autonomy

One of the kids gets out of their small town, but the rest get conventional jobs and are on course for conventional lives. Here’s Anthony:

(His mother) believed in killing herself working. . . . An idea Anthony was starting to subscribe to. At least he had right on his side. It was now his turn to complain about taxes, immigrants and politicians. He didn’t owe anyone anything, he was useful, he complained, he was exploited, he was dimly aware of being part of a vast majority, the mass of people who could do everything and were sure there was nothing to be done.

SEGU by Maryse Conde

A novel about Africa before colonialism that does not act as if before colonialism Africa was just hanging around waiting for colonialism.

Maryse Conde, a writer I have never heard of, has clearly done an incredible amount of research about historic West Africa. We are plunged into the life of an African family in Segu, a city-state that dominates the surrounding peoples through good old-fashioned violence. The main patriarch and protagonist thinks he is madly in love with his second wife who turns out to be a slave (?). The first son converts to Islam. The second one goes hunting when he isn’t supposed to and is picked up as a slave by their competitors. I mean it ALL goes on. And they still haven’t met any Europeans. Eventually this happens and then we get into Brazil, catholicism, and all sorts.

It maybe doesn’t have a ton of narrative drive, being a multi-generational, multo-decade story, something that is always hard to keep moving along, but I enjoyed it all the same.

ZINKY BOYS by Svetlana Alexievich

An unexpectedly topical read about military misadventure in Afghanistan. There are many to choose from; this is the Soviet one in the 1980s. Alexievich, a Nobel winner I had never heard of, puts together first hand accounts from the Russians who served. It is exceedingly gnarly. At least the American soldiers were provided with the basics. Here is a Russian nurse:

Our boys sold (their hospital camp beds). And I couldn’t really blame them. They were dying for three roubles a month – that was a private’s pay. Three roubles, meat crawling with worms, and scraps of rotten fish. We all had scurvy, I lost all my front teeth. So they sold their blankets and bought opium, or something sweet to eat, or some foreign gimmicks . . . . . the officers drank the surgical spirit so we had to use petrol to clean the wounds.

Almost all the soldiers were exceedingly young recruits, sent with little training, who were told they were going to build a glorious socialist future for their Afghan brothers who welcomed them.

When they died, sent back in Zinc coffins (thus their nickname) no one was allowed to say where they died, or that it was even a war. Later, the survivors were blamed for being involved. The extent of their disillusion is perhaps the most depressing part of this book.

I’m ashamed that in my finals I got an ‘A’ in Scientific Communism for my critique of bourgeois pluralism. I’m ashamed that after the Congress of People’s Deputies pronounced this war a disgrace we were given ‘Internationalist Fighters’ badges and a Certificate from the Supreme Soviet

Putting you life on the line to end bourgeois pluralism. You want to laugh. At the same time, it’s sad how difficult it would now be to convince anyone to die for an ideal. And especially me. I can’t think of any concept for which I’d be willing to lay down my life.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I listened to this book, which is about a long journey by wagon from Wisconsin to South Dakota, while making a make shorter journey by car from Wisconsin and South Dakota. ALL HAIL THE COMBUSTION ENGINE! I thought ten hours was a lot, but that was as nothing to the multiple weeks it took, Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura and Baby Carrie Ingalls.

Not much has improved in terms of entertainment. I googled ‘things to do off the I-90’ and the most helpful suggestion was from a trucker who said people do like to laugh at the ‘Kum and Go’ gas station (this I had already done), and maybe eat some pancake-wrapped sausages there, but there is not much else to do unless ‘you like the smell of pig sh*t.’

This semi-autobiographical story is a pretty interesting account of the settler experience. It is quite amazing to see how they managed to create a homestead out of an axe, a gun, and the prairie. It was also interesting to see that they clearly understood that they were taking land from the Native Americans. I would have expected some kind of soft-soaping, but it is exceedingly clear that they are in conflict with people already using the land, and understood themselves to be in conflict with them. They are essentially waiting for the government to hand the land over to them. I learn from Wikipedia that Ingalls daughter, who owned the rights to this story, was a raging libertarian, so I find this hilarious.

What I will probably most remember about this book is it’s success in capturing a small child’s view of the world. Many books try this, and very few succeed. It was really elegantly done here. I expected a much less sophisticated book, for some reason. I now understand why it’s a classic.